Although debate is a richly structured and prevalent form of discourse, it has
received little scholarly attention. Logicians have focused on the structure of individual
arguments—how they divide into premises and conclusions, which in turn divide into
various constituents. In contrast, I focus on the structure of sets of arguments, showing
how arguments are themselves constituents in high-level dialectical structures. I represent
debates and positions by graphs whose vertices correspond to arguments and whose
edges correspond to two inter-argument relations: “dispute” and “support,” respectively.
On this basis I develop a theory of the structure of debate.